“We made a mistake,” the top U.S. diplomat said Sunday in an online video chat with China’s main English-language newspaper, China Daily. Clinton, in one of her final events before concluding a weeklong trip through Asia, said the U.S. had embarked on energy conservation in the 1970s when oil prices shot up, but that it then dropped the ball in the 1980s when oil prices came down.

She told her host on the chat, a Chinese professor asking her questions on behalf of Internet users, that America’s error had been thinking it had enough resources to never have to focus on improving fuel efficiency or taking other energy conservation measures. “We thought we didn’t have to worry about [them] any more,” she said. (She didn’t talk specifically about U.S. energy policy in the 1990s, when her husband was president).

Owning up to mistakes is becoming something of a trademark of the new U.S. administration – part of what President Barack Obama, who has acknowledged his own blunderson cabinet appointments, has called “an era of responsibility.”

Clinton clearly had a goal beyond simple self-criticism, however. China and the U.S. are the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse cases.

Clinton has made clear that working with China to address climate change will be one of her major initiatives as secretary-– and sees admitting America’s errors, something she also did elsewhere on her trip, as a way to persuade China to alter its own behavior. “We don’t want you to make the same mistakes that we made,” she said.

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